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Mind your language

Where’s the ‘mystery’ in mystery plays?

19 February 2022

9:00 AM

19 February 2022

9:00 AM

In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4 broadcast them separately from the soap opera, in which the village policeman has been driven to conversion by playing Jesus.

My husband, commenting on all this, said that ‘of course’ the word mystery meant a trade or craft, as the medieval plays were performed by companies of trade guilds.

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